The smart industry, by unifying the Internet of Things (IoT), big data, cloud computing, robotics, etc, can facilitate intelligence monitoring and decisions during supply chain management and manufacturing process, which will significantly improve product efficiency and quality while reducing costs. The electronic chips integrating advanced analog and radio-frequency circuits and systems are the foundation of realizing smart industrial automation. This project succeeded in inventing advanced circuit techniques for wireless transceivers, clock generators, voice wakeup and control, and sensors, which enable industrial automation chips with unprecedented performances. The techniques and IC prototypes developed from this project were transferred via 35 academic publications and 9 Chinese patent applications, including 9 papers in the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) and 11 papers in the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits (JSSC), which are the topmost journal and conference in the IC area, showing the leading position of our group among others in the world-class universities in the same period.

Fig 1 Micrographs of the 16 advanced chips for enabling smart industrial automation (from our published ISSCC and JSSC papers)

Fig 2 Benchmark of the chips developed in this project with state-of-the-art:(Top-left) wireless receiver, (Top-right) frequency synthesizer,(Bottom-left) voice wakeup,(Bottom-right) temperature sensor